Motivated Reasoning and Cognitive Effort in Political News Information Processing

Abstract

Political misinformation is endemic and threatens rational democratic decision making. The theories accounting for this widespread failure of rational information processing remain contested. Drawing from established information processing theories such as the elaboration likelihood model, irrational information processing is explained by this classical account as a failure to apply sufficient cognitive effort to the discernment of true and false political information. On the other hand, a central prediction of motivated reasoning theories in the context of political information processing is that cognitive effort is motivated by goals other than accuracy such as identify maintenance. According to the motivated reasoning account, information incongruent with identity maintenance goals should elicit motivational threat, which is the motivation to defend one’s prior beliefs. Therefore, greater cognitive effort should not predict greater discernment of true political information from false. In the classical reasoning account, reasoning motivations other than accuracy are considered less influential, and cognitive effort is thought to be more directly predictive of veracity discernment. To test these contrasting accounts, I conducted two studies (N1 = 88, N2 = 591) using mixed effects modeling with a stimulus sample size of 72 news stories in the main study. The congruence of these news stories, focusing on three societal institutions (federal agencies, public education, and the mainstream media), with political identification was an experimentally manipulated factor, and cognitive effort was measured with both an implicit measure, response latency, as well as an explicit measure, self-report. Across two studies, a few consistent patterns emerged. Diverging from the predictions of the classical account, cognitive effort, in terms of response latency and self-report, was not associated with the discernment of news veracity. The experimentally manipulated variable was associated with cognitive effort. However, contradicting the predictions of the theory of motivated skepticism, incongruent news information was associated with less cognitive effort. Examining motivational processes more directly, I found that motivational threat was associated with greater anger, greater self-reported cognitive effort, as well as an amplification of positive attitudes toward institutions. Together, these findings suggest that a reconsideration of both the classical and motivational accounts in the context of news veracity discernment.